[30. april 2002]
udstilling
Peter Geschwind, from the video Sound Cut 2002

Bugs and System Errors
- The art of Peter Geschwind
Text: Nils Forsberg

Exhibition: April 5th - May 11th, 2002

The leisure club MOGADISHNI
Artillerivej 40, house 9, stair b, floor 4
DK 2300 Copenhagen
Tel +45 32543535 fax +45 32543545
mail@mogadishni.com
www.mogadishni.com

Thrash and candy packages that move, scrubbing brushes and a cleaning agent bottle forming a bizarre vomiting sculpture, a sculpture called Candyman with head made of a breakfast cereal package, that sounds like a vintage Atari computer game...

Peter Geschwinds art sometimes looks like as if the most forgotten and downgraded everyday objects of your home have come alive. Familiar and funny, but also strange and somewhat psychotic, his works balance on on the edge of the uncanny. How should one understand it?


Peter Geschwind, from the video Sound Cut 2002

The animation of nature is an old theme in the history of art, as is the anthropomorphism, when dead things are given human qualities. To put Geschwinds works in this tradition, however, would be to miss the point a bit. Not only because what is made looking alive is not 'nature' but rather its opposite; the garbage dump of the modern society. It also has more to do with mechanics than metaphysics; Geschwind's influences and ideas come mostly from various b-movies and computer games.

What about the kinetic art of the fifties and sixties, then? The neo-dada of Jean Tinguely and others was to a large extent a reaction against the austere abstract art of the time, his complicated nonsense constructions being a way of mocking with modernist aesthetics. Geschwind's works, on the other hand, are always low-tech. He uses existing devices - or simply customizes toys - rather than he builds ingenious kinetic sculptures and often claims his disinterest in the technological side of his pieces.

To put it another way, Peter Geschwind's art is not about art (Art). It deals with the contemporary popular culture and the consumption society, and such starting points make it more direct and also give it a more political dimension.

Take, for example, the ongoing Cheap High project, a collaboration with Gunilla Klingberg. Out of plastic bags collected all over the world, inflated with a big fan, they have created an ever-growing monster. In the new context, the logotypes of the bags become meaningless and the sculpture turns into an image of blown up and yet so empty nature of one of the fundaments of the capitalistic economy, i.e. the aura of the logo and the brandname.

Recently, Peter Geschwind has turned his attention towards video again, the medium that he used to work with before he started making the action sculptures. Here, the points of departure are in a way the opposite; the illusion of 'life', the realism of the film, is taken away instead of put into dead things. Nevertheless, the phychotic end result is virtually the same. In "Enter the Dragon (Sound Edit)", he has edited and looped sequence of the classic Bruce Lee film after the sounds of kicks and punches and thereby created an rather abstract choreography. The original narrative is disrupted and the clip assumes a life of its own, as if infected by a data virus or being subject of a general system error.

A similar strategy is used in another new video, Sound Cut. Sequences of ordinary everyday activities - the slamming of doors, vacuum cleaning etc. - are edited from their sounds into the strict 25 frames/second scheme of the video in a four-stroke rhytm (actually from the Dead Kennedys song Too drunk to fuck). By being rendered in this way, these samples of well-known things and activities turn into a funny, but also a bit too strange, mechanical ballet.

Where will the bug turn up next? Who is really in command of the familiar things in our surroundings? The answer is, probably, somewhere out there. Poltergeist, anyone?